Evernote vs OneNote – Which One is the Best in Windows for Home or Business Users?

Digital note taking is the future of taking your notes with you everywhere. No one can deny the benefits of taking notes digitally and there are many apps who make use of these benefits to provide very useful note-taking apps. Evernote and OneNote are two of the most popular note-taking applications. If you don’t know the difference between these two, then here is a comparison in 2016 of Evernote vs OneNote and which one is best in Windows 10,8.1 for home or business users.

While both OneNote and Evernote share similar features, most of these similar features are implemented better in one than the other. Following is a description of both note-taking apps along with the features they implement the best:

Microsoft OneNote

OneNote is developed by Microsoft and it is available for free as a standalone application as well as a part of the Microsoft Office Suite.

The interface of OneNote is very similar to other Office applications like Word, PowerPoint and Excel. It can take some time for you to learn the interface but still it is regarded as more productive for a note taking application. Since OneNote is developed by Microsoft themselves, it works fluidly on Windows whereas Evernote lags if you using an outdated system. In OneNote, you can work on one notebook at a time and there are tabs for each section of the notebook on the top. On the left side of the screen, there is a list of pages inside the current selected notebook section and on the right side is where the page is displayed. On the very top is the Quick Access Bar which is the most useful feature among all Office applications.

Paragraphs in OneNote can be used as free floating sections, you can write a paragraph and just drag it anywhere. You can write anything you want in a section and arrange it later as you wish. Most people don’t like this feature put prefer line by line note taking.

In OneNote, you can draw and handwrite notes right inside the application whereas in Evernote, you can only import handwritten notes as images. There are a lot of tools in OneNote for handwriting and drawing including different types of pens and highlighters with different colors and thickness along with shapes and lines like in Paint.

This is going to be a great feature if you have a tablet with Stylus and Windows OS and built-in free OneNote App (or other version which comes with Office version)

Just like all other Office apps, OneNote has templates which is very useful feature. If you want to take notes like a meeting agenda or lecture notes, you can easily select a template and start working without having to waste any time.

If you ever wanted to take notes while watching a video or reading an article on your browser or just while doing anything else on Windows, you can easily dock the OneNote window to the left or right of the screen. It is very convenient and it changes the size of the window to a smaller one so OneNote does not interfere with your other work.

Math Function in OneNote

Many note-taking fall behind OneNote at math functions, even Evernote does not have them. In OneNote, you can add full equations and solve them as well as write your own. If you type a fraction, it will solve it for you. This math feature is much similar to the math features in other Office applications.

You just type the formula with equal (=) sign and press enter, OneNote will do the math for you in OneNote.

OneNote has the option to encrypt sections, but not pages or notebooks. In Evernote you can encrypt selections of text, but not pages or notebooks.

Version history of a note is available for both OneNote and Evernote. In OneNote, it is entirely free, whereas in Evernote, it is only available for paid users. This is one of the useful feature to mention in our Evernote vs OneNote comparison.

OneNote has very flexible options for exporting notes, sections or notebooks. You can export to PDF, XPS, MHT or .one formats. Currently you cannot import any note files into OneNote.

Evernote for Windows

Evernote is developed by the Evernote Corporation and it is available with a freemium model where basic features are available for free and more features are available for a subscription. While being much similar to OneNote, these are some features which are best in Evernote:

In the Evernote application for Windows, there are three columns for notebooks, pages and page display from left to right. You can close a column for more breathing space.

Both OneNote and Evernote have a web clipper which can clip webpages and copy them to a note, but the Evernote has a very advanced web clipper. You can select which area you want to clip of a webpage and you can annotate the clipping. You can also select where your clipping goes rather than just letting Evernote make a new note for that clip. This will allow you to select the web clipping screenshot to go to particular note in Evernote.

In Evernote, you can give direct links to other notes in a notebook which is very useful for things like documentation. This gives your notebook a Wiki like feel where there are links for everything that is happening in your notebook.

Evernote has a better tagging system for notes. You can type out any tag you want so that you can search that tag easily. OneNote forces you to create a tag and then save it before applying it.

Evernote has a far more powerful search engine than OneNote, with at least twenty different types of search queries to narrow down your search for the best results.

Evernote can export notes into a single HTML file or separate HTML files. You can also export to ENEX format if you are migrating notes to import to Evernote installed on another computer.

Pricing and Plans

The biggest difference that is the deciding point between Evernote vs OneNote in the pricing and plans available for them.

OneNote is 100% free to download and use without any in-app purchases or restrictions. Your notes will be stored in OneDrive and not locally.

Evernote has pricing plans available. The free plan will get you 60 MB of new data which is very less. If you are going to use it heavily then you will need the paid option. The $25 per year plan gets you 1 GB of data per month and offline access to your notebooks. The $50 per year plan gets you 10 GB of new data per month, version history of notes, annotating PDFs and converting notes into presentations.

Final Verdict on OneNote vs Evernote

If you look at the pricing options, you will obviously prefer OneNote, but that still depends on what you want to use it for. Home or Business. If you want to use it for home, you probably will be a light user and won’t want to spend money, so OneNote is best for you.

If you want to use a note-taking application heavily and want to collaborate with multiple people for your business, then Evernote with a paid option is best for you.

We hope this would have explained Evernote vs OneNote and helped to select the best note taking app for Windows 10/8.1 for home or business users. If you are looking to use a note-taking application, you will be able to decide easily between Evernote and OneNote according to your usage.